The present disclosure relates generally to the field of social media analytics.
Social media offer a good and constantly updated source of information about ongoing events in cities, e.g., riots, concerts, traffic, etc. These events or incidents can include activities involving groups of participants within a fixed geographic area. Moreover, social media offer a unique view to achieve situational awareness, e.g., direct assessment of social impact, based on elements such as mobile sensors not fixed to a location, social network features, and human perception.
Typically, situational awareness is computed from physical sensors, not capturing people's perceptions. In the course of incidents, people's perceptions with respect to different factors, e.g., criticality of a safety incident, user participation in a concert, etc., may change. However, the lack of real-time monitoring and ranking, both at the present time and in the near future, of incidents in a city with respect to user-selected measures of interest is problematic. A system capable of providing such monitoring and ranking of incidents, including projecting the ranking of the incidents in the future, could significantly help in performing resource allocation and acting promptly by, for example, city managers and/or police.